Observations from a Hill

I watched Sir Keir Starmer's Chatham House speech this morning, which was measured, fair and impartial; diplomatic, shall we say. Given the split in intra-party opinion on the matter - and let's face it, the last thing any of us want or need is for the only party that can actually get shut of this ridiculous and dangerous government at a general election to implode at the last fence - he did a good job in balancing the issues to forestall potential internecine revolt. Hamas have obviously committed an act of extreme terrorism against Israel: fact, and no contesting that one. Israel has reacted, understandably, to this atrocity: but the key issue is the scale and locus of that reaction: they have applied extreme force pretty much without concern for the ordinary Palestinians of Gaza, and continue to do so, with catastrophic effect. This can only be interpreted as 'collective punishment': there is no other way of looking at it. Claims of acting merely in self-defence have...

  The view down the garden this afternoon, post-major-tree-pruning activities. I've just finished the periodic radical haircut on the old willows [back, centre]: they'll never be much more than their rather stunted selves, due to their position and the total lack of proper soil in our garden, but I still need two sections of a ladder to work on the bigger of the two, and their flexibility makes working up there a pretty wobbly experience: a bit like working up some of the more iffy telegraph poles when I was with BT. Jane's also given the heavily pollarded silver birch - slightly left of centre in the midground of the picture - a good top out; and the out of control [as usual] lilac just in front of the willows, has had a good scalping from the two of us. All in all, we've reclaimed quite a bit of the view out towards Ynys Môn, which can't be at all bad, and in doing so, we've taken out significant amounts of dead wood and spindly growth from the plants concerne...

Pictured, the box from the pastel de nata - Portuguese custard tarts - brought back for us on Friday by Leo, on returning from visiting his brother in Portugal. They had been bought freshly baked that day, and I ate most of them on Friday evening [they don't keep]. Portugal has many, many great things to offer: music, food, climate and its people: they even better the Italians when it comes to Espresso - um café - [just don't tell the Italians]: like the musical culture of Fado, and pastel de nata [practically a religion there] - it is a central part of Portuguese southern urban society. One delight I would add to these may not please those of a vegetarian or vegan persuasion, but once tasted it is never forgotten: roast suckling pig, which I was introduced to as Negrais, the place famous for the method of cooking it. As I think I've mentioned before, I was staying in Lisbon for a three-day conference, some twenty-ish years ago, and whilst I was there, frequented a local ...

Spotted today on one of our already autumn-trimmed buddleias, a Red Admiral sunning itself as if this was July. So, I guess summer's not quite done yet: another example of our changing climate. I ain't got much more to say as I've spent this evening watching the Rugby Union World Cup final between South Africa and New Zealand: it came down to a one point difference at the eighty-minute mark, with the  'Boks in the ascendancy for a record fourth time in the history of the competition. The All-Blacks, despite playing a man down for half the game, could so easily have stolen the affair, but there you go: a great game of rugby, whichever way you cut it...

Further to my recent ramblings regarding the 'Mule', I've fallen down a rabbit-hole of what comes first? - style - chicken & eggism regarding tool selection and/or manufacture [financial frugality trumps financial promiscuity: what can be made, shall not have to be bought]. What I need is a decent and multipurpose circle-cutting jig for the palm router, and I'm not prepared to pay through the nose for an off-the-shelf jobbie, that I can easily make myself. However, I would like to make a decent job of such a tool, so I figured that I would have to employ the services of my lash-up of a router table to cut the adjustment slot the thing would need. Having dug out said lash-up table, I've decided I need a better and easier to use, and store, solution. So, here I am, trying to design a better tool, to make a tool, to make a thing. The scissor-jack pictured will form the router lift mechanism, [a maker stalwart on YouTube], and the various bits from the lash-up will ...

  I was hoping to make some progress on at least one of my current projects today and report back to you, but in the aftermath of yesterday's tree-cutting activities and the side effects of the Covid jab, I've taken one step forward and two steps back in that department. So, apropos of bugger all, the above picture is of a hotel sign that featured in two of my early-teens summer holidays with my family, back in the late 1960s. The Brathay Fell Hotel was a big old house just outside Ambleside in The Lakes, where I stayed with my mom, sister, nan & grandad, and my uncle, who did all the driving. One abiding memory of our stays there is that of the room - in the old stable-block? - where they had a table tennis table, and wondrously, bar-billiards. I still have a letter my mom wrote my dad whilst we were staying there, and how she was teaching my sister and me how to play table tennis, a game I still love to play, albeit occasionally. As to bar billiards; if I had the spare ca...

  Pictured: the sandwich takes shape, not as I said earlier 40mm, but rather 38mm thick; because of course, the ply is 9mm rather than 10mm, as I well know. Chalk it down to age, carelessness or absent-mindedness, it all amounts to the same. Anyway, I've got it roughly to some sort of usable size, with just some final trimming to do. Then I need to work out a method of trialling different boxes, so that they're easy to swap around, but seal adequately to the baffle, in differing configurations: could be a challenge, but then that's half the point of the exercise, anyway. Earlier today, we set to on giving the willow tree at the bottom of the garden a well-needed haircut: the first trim in I'd guess, five years or so. The picture below shows the view towards Ynys Môn from the top of my ladder, post cut. As you can see, the weather has been very kind to us, and I was down to tee-shirt and jeans for the duration of the work. Then, it was off to Y Canolfan Brechu, Bangor [V...

  Pictured is the little circuit board I ordered a few days ago from a 'British supplier' on eBay for the stupendous outlay of £4.33 including postage. I've not had time to check it out yet as Jane, No.1 Son and I have been out for lunch today for my birthday - don't ask which one - at The White Eagle, Rhoscolyn, and very nice it was, too. The device shown is a function generator outputting sine, square and sawtooth waveforms from a few hertz to around 100 kHz. It is built around an ICL3038 IC, which is essentially a voltage-controlled oscillator which found favour with synthesizer builders a number of years ago. The original manufacturer discontinued production a long time ago, and original chips were changing hands for daft money on eBay, etc., until the Chinese got into the game. I've no idea of the quality or reliability of the things, and I really don't understand why the individual chips sell from similar sources for three times the price of the above depl...

  I thought I'd get the base material together for the 'mule' speaker baffle I mentioned the other day. Pictured is the glue-up of the two components of the laminate: 20mm particle board glued to 10 9mm ply, which will form the outer surface of the baffle. When it's dry, I'll size it, rout the holes and rebates for the drive units, and seal the whole deal with a PVA-based varnish I've got, which is perfect for sealing timber or composite materials, and will hopefully compensate for the asymmetry of the laminate's moisture absorption characteristics and prevent warping of the finished piece. For future reference, I might opt for a thicker baffle, with a second skin of ply on the rear, which would make a heavy and stable baffle of 40 38 mm thickness, which should both resist bending forces and help to smear out any panel resonances [just a guess, but this is jazz acoustics, after all]. We'll see how we get on, anyway: I'm under no pressure. That'...

  Sticking with the theme of aero-modelling and personal nostalgia, the KeilKraft advert on the back cover of the December '66 Aero Modeller I mentioned - a slot they invariably held over the years - took me back to when my dad decided to accede to my less-than-subtle attempts to get my parents to buy me a model aero engine for my birthday. What I was angling for was a P.A.W, as these were the kit du jour amongst our crowd. However, the old man, perspicacious as he was, opted to get me an E.D Racer instead. E.D's star was no longer in the ascendant at the time, and I felt a momentary qualm of disappointment on its presentation, which quickly evaporated when I realized what a truly scrumptious piece of miniature engineering it was in reality. Displacing 2.5cc, the diesel sported twin ball-race crankshaft bearings and finished castings to die for: this demanded some serious care in running in. I did this over a period of a couple of weeks of evenings after school, with the motor ...

  Pictured, an article in the December 1966 issue of Aero Modeller magazine, featuring their plans for a 1/24th scale control-line model of a Handley Page Halifax bomber of WWII vintage. As you can see from the top photo, for a control-line model, it's pretty large. At around the time of the publication of this issue, or just after, my mates and I used to fly model planes in the local park, and there was always a contingent of older aeromodellers around, to show us how the more grand projects were built and flown. There was a local guy - to us, he seemed ancient, but I guess he was probably only in his early twenties: we were only twelve, after all - who'd actually built one of these beasts, and one Sunday afternoon we witnessed its inaugural test flight. It was powered by four DC Sabre 1.5cc 'diesel' engines [two-stroke compression-ignition engines], and tethered on some rather long steel lines to its owner and builder. Getting all four engines fired up and tuned rough...

Anyone that knows me knows that I constantly rant and rave at the state of the world, politics, and particularly inequality and the exploitation of the weak by the powerful. Nothing new to report on that front; but what I have shied away from in the last few days, is to comment on the current Gaza conflict, and I'm not about to change that stance any time soon. The complexities of the situation are legion, and so demand deep analysis, not only of recent geopolitics, but of the long and convoluted historical politicking that has brought about this tragic affair. Anyone who believes this to be a binomial, zero-sum equation of left versus right, good versus bad, or Judaism versus Islam, is deluded. The actors of real influence in this conflict, as in so many before in history, are far more devious and self-interested than simple tribal allegiance would afford. State and corporate forces dictate the narratives that incite these conflicts: it has ever been thus throughout the history o...

I've invested a very modest sum in what we used to call a clutch pencil - pictured - as I'm fed up with the motley collection of marking implements that currently infests my workshop. For the princely sum of £7.99, the thing came with sixty replacement leads in HB, 2H, 4H, 2B & 4B grades, plus a sharpener and an eraser: eminently comprehensively useful and a nice writing implement to boot. This will be my main marking out and note-taking device for the foreseeable, methinks. I gave the new palm router a quick test this afternoon, and after an initial wobble, where I thought that the collet chuck wasn't doing its job, I got a test groove cut in a piece of scrap. It turned out that the chuck really needs a good bit of torque on the spanners to get the collet - a rather crude, single-slot affair - to close tight enough around the shank of the bit. I took it out, cleaned the crap out of the seating and the groove of the collet itself, and it worked fine, second time around....

  Pictured, my latest addition to the tool chest: a palm router, that arrived this morning; something that I would normally have to have saved up for, but in this case I found [several] suppliers of these things on eBay. Instead of £150-350, this thing cost me just around fifteen quid, with free postage: and it wasn't the cheapest on offer! I haven't tried it out yet, but it seems reasonably well-made and fit for purpose. I bought it specifically to rout out the mule speaker baffle that I mentioned earlier in the week for my cabinet experiments; as my Dad's old router is not really, shall we say, delicate enough to do the job, and anyway, it's currently strapped into my lash-up router table, where it works just fine, so it's staying where it is. I'll have a bash with the thing tomorrow. I might even make up a baffle, as I've got enough material in stock to at least make the one. Keep you posted...

  As an erstwhile photographer and technician, time - let alone for a musician or poet - is kind of central to one's activity, no matter the physical domain or the era in which you are working. The basic equation is sensitivity (of the medium capturing the image formed by whatever means you employ: mostly cameras of some sort or another) equals intensity (of the light illuminating the subject being photographed) multiplied by the length of the exposure of the medium to that particular intensity of light. Under any normal circumstances, a camera or similar device - film or digital - captures the reflected light from a subject in anything from 1/30s to 1/1000s. I've taken multi-minute night exposures which, with film, requires a lot of compensatory calculation in the processing of that film; due to a phenomenon called reciprocity failure, where the linear relationship between exposure (time x intensity) breaks down, and increasingly extended chemical development time is required ...

  I mentioned yesterday that I wanted to upcycle my dad's old Wharfedale speaker drive units and crossovers in a new build. I think I might just use them as a test bench to try out some old cabinet ideas of mine, and maybe resurrect some very old technical ideas from the fifties and before. So, I intend to build a standard mule speaker baffle that will allow me to house the active bits in one piece, so I can swap out various configurations of box behind it. I'm going to go for a laminate of the cheapest particle board - for economy and because it's dense and reasonably homogenous - and thinner ply, for its machinability and finish. Facing the dense core with good ply will also make it more durable in the swapping between boxes for testing scenario. I've got a few ideas of my own to try: some going back to fag-packet scribbles thirty or forty years ago that were never tried; and some very much older ideas that never gained mainstream traction for long, but which I've...

  Further to yesterday's post, I do feel a bit of jazz speaker building coming on: I need colouration, warmth, and a bit of over-emphasised bass. As I said yesterday, accuracy is relative, and in most circumstances unobtainable: the dynamics of real life musical situations are far too complex. There are exceptions, but for the most part you are making technology produce its own performance at best: which system sounds 'better' is entirely subjective, just as in real performance. Harmonic distortion in the audio reproduction chain - in small and controlled amounts - can modify and often enhance that subjective experience: a little even harmonic distortion gives the impression of brightness, whilst odd harmonic distortion offers a sense of 'hair' or warmth to the sound, mediating harshness. All musical instruments, acoustic or electric, including the human voice, rely on rich harmonic content - non-linear distortions, effectively - for 'character' and emotiona...

  I was just reading a piece in this weekend's FT HTSI [don't judge me - I'm aware of the irony and implications] about Hi-Fi speakers. Rhodri Marsden basically saying what every sane music lover says: whatever sound floats your boat is good. His point is that the music comes first. It also begs the question: what is fidelity? For nigh-on seventy years, the quest has been to squeeze the sound of a full symphony orchestra, and maybe even a full chorus, let alone a Great Pipe Organ, onto some recording medium, and then expect a chain of electromechanical or even digital kit to reproduce it faithfully. Not going to happen. Never was, never will: the psychoacoustics of a human's interaction with the acoustics and dynamics of the concert hall alone will scupper that ambition. As for capturing and reproducing the sonic fury of early Black Sabbath in concert, don't even bother trying. I've lived through the six or so decades of struggle and debate over fidelity, quali...

  I've done a Lost & Found a couple of times before, but this is more of a Found & Lost, I think. Pictured is an example of the Werra 1 that I alluded to when I posted on the first one I got from eBay a couple of years ago. I mentioned the earlier examples of the marques' purer, boxier design ethic, and dug this example one up a few weeks later, also on eBay; complete with its ever-ready case, but missing the statement lens hood/cap unique to these cameras. Nevertheless, it's pretty much a working example, and brutally beautiful in and of itself: a little slab of Bauhaus austerity. Subsequently, I picked up another Werra - I can't remember which model, which had its - albeit damaged - hood/cap with it. The thing is, the only member of this trio I can find is the one above. No trace of the other two, or of a Pentax Spotmatic body purchased shortly after, as part of a job lot: the better of the two cameras from that purchase being in use at the moment. To cap it a...

We decided to treat ourselves to lunch out this afternoon. We opted for a trip to The Gazelle, just outside Menai Bridge on the coast road to Beaumaris. The glorious early Autumn sunshine and the still calm of the day was welcome relief after yesterday's foul tempest. It also promised fine views across the Menai Strait, as the pub/bistro is located in pretty much the loveliest spot along that stretch of coast, being originally the location of the terminus of the old chain ferry from the mainland [the view from our table at the top], and commands a vista of the mountains of Snowdonia to die for. On a day like today, there are few finer waterside spots in Europe. We hadn't been to the place for some time, and were curious to how it was shaping up on the food front, now that a near neighbour and friend of ours is chef de cuisine there. I wrote before that I usually test the mettle of a kitchen by ordering squid - as I've said, it sorts out the serious from the lacklustre - but...

  When we officially left the EU what seems like eons ago, I signed up randomly for all the Government email bulletins regarding the progress of regulation changes, and advice to traders and businesses, who, prior to Brexit, had a fairly easy bureaucratic ride of trading within the community, with only local taxation differences to concern themselves about. The above flowchart is possibly the exemplar of the knots we have subsequently tied ourselves up in. Entirely at our own behest. Mental. If you want the full thing, it's here . It ain't pretty: just like Brexit.

  Keir Starmer's speech to The Labour Party conference today was measured, intelligent, and I'm sure heartfelt. The Labour agenda seems to me to be a re-affirmation of the post-war Attlee government's aims to engage in a social contract between business and the people who actually make business work: the people employed by business, and to leaven it with the socialist ideals of free education and healthcare for all. Over the last forty-odd years, there has been a deliberate and cynical disconnection created between the acquisition of wealth and the source of that wealth - the workers - by the neoliberal Right and their supporters/beneficiaries, very much in the spirit of the landed gentry and inheritance of times [mostly] past. The Tory Party have wreaked absolute havoc on society and the economy for nearly half a century, broken only briefly by New Labour aping their tropes and foibles for a few intervening years. This Labour Party feels different, however. For instance, S...

  I was hoping to post a bit of a 'doing' piece today, centred around the studio workshop; but I'm kind of scuppered by the results of the rather-too-enthusiastic garden maintenance work I engaged in yesterday. I really do need to learn to pace myself better, these days: my brain still insists on thinking I'm twenty-eight, rather than north of forty years older than that. Every one of my core back muscles is screaming "Fool!" at me today, so I've done bugger all else but read, consume YouTube stuff, and groan as sotto voce as possible. Things I have picked up on today, in between bouts of wincing and self-medicating: a found copy of the frankly insane conspiracy 'newspaper', The Light, carrying an article on 'geoengineering'; the news that AI deep fakery is entering British party politicking just as The Labour Party conference kicks off [Starmer faked verbally tearing strips off staff - really? The guy is a bland and measured barrister, for...

  What on earth motivate s a Buddhist woman, a KC no less, and the offspring of first generation economic migrants herself, to make a Tory party conference speech as Home Secretary that echoes so strongly the 'Rivers of Blood' speech made by Enoch Powell in 1968? It beggars belief that someone, only her own generation away from people - her parents - seeking to find a better life in the UK in the 1960s: the very kind of migrants she now deems it necessary to demonize in her appalling diatribe to conference this week, could conceive ideas such as these. I simply don't see how she reconciles her views with her family's history, her religion, or even her work as a barrister. Doesn't compute. I quote from Powell's speech directly, and I challenge anyone to refute the parallels with Braverman's diatribe; or indeed not to see the rank hypocrisy, cloistered self-entitlement and class-blinkered attitude that informs her thinking: Powell, talking of a conversation he...

 Jane's been away this week, staying with her mother in Carnforth, so I thought that a roast dinner would an appropriate repast for her return. Pictured, my plateful of roast chicken, tenderstem broccoli, gravy and most importantly: the roasters! As always the star, my olive-oil and garlic roast spuds hit the spot yet again. Maris Pipers par-boiled with crushed garlic and a splash of olive oil in the water, roasted in more olive oil until well done. Nuff said...

  As promised, an update on the old Record woodworking vise installation. Sorted. I've added some seriously chunky composite cheeks to the jaws of the thing, which extend the width of the vise by an inch, to eight inches, and which give an extra inch-and-a-half of working depth. The jaws still allow stock of five inches thickness to be secured, which for a relative tiddler like this, is more than enough to be going on with. I've sealed and waxed the cheek-pieces to resist moisture and reduce wear, so all in all, not a bad few hours work. I also took the opportunity to move my largest metalworking vise further along toward the pillar drill on the right of the bench to avoid potential conflict between my elbow and a rather large chunk of cast iron when using the newly installed wood vise... 

  Pictured, my latest bargain: a 7" Record woodworking vise, for around half the normal asking price at twenty quid. I've started working out a plot for installing it on the bench I moved from the shed a while ago [blog posts passim], and made some inroads into making the wooden plates to install on the jaws of the thing: the previous owner had, as you can see, jury-rigged some metalworking jaws for it, which I'll put to one side out of respect for the original owner, but which are redundant due to the fact that I already have two metal vises in use. I'm not going to renovate this, aside from remove the worst of the rust and grease up the mechanism: I'll leave its existing patina of use, which I always like about older stuff, anyway. Progress reports will be posted as and when...

  Just watched an episode of The Repair Shop this evening, and the late actor John Clive's daughter brought in the Corgi Yellow Submarine model presented to him after voicing John Lennon on the Beatles' animated film in the late sixties. This brought to mind my brush with the model back in the early nineties, when we were working on a contract with the then Thorn-EMI; providing various audiovisual displays and their associated control systems for three locations around London. The Beatles connection with EMI was obviously the central theme to all the displays, and the Yellow Submarine featured in one of a number of 'vitrines' which flanked the lifts at each floor of their headquarters in Tenterden Street, in the West End. I had the task of doing some of the animatronics for the cabinets, as well as some of the other electronics, and the one that sticks in my mind is the Beatles' sub. The model was one that our London contact, who shall remain nameless, for reasons v...

    Tonight's repast: a kofta curry: well, a kofta curry lash-up from a Patak's Madras sauce kit and some beef meatballs from Tesco, tweaked and seasoned in an attempt to raise the thing from pedestrian ready-meal to edible. It sort of worked, but frankly, I'd rather have my own, home cooking, and to be honest, it doesn't take that much more effort. It was OK. No more.

  I've mentioned before at some point my uncle Arthur's involvement in Operation Market Garden in World War Two. He never, ever, talked about anything he did or witnessed then or before, so I've always been in the dark about his experiences at the time. I was rooting around the other day in one of the large boxes of family photographs that we possess, and came across this one, taken in Italy, showing Arthur on the left, his Airborne patch clearly visible on his right arm, and his cousin, Douglas, to his left. I'd heard the family story about how the two of them met by accident on a railway platform at Brindisi: Arthur in the First Airborne and Douglas a Navy boy [his attire in this photograph appears to be a bit non-standard apart from his cap]; having been separated for some time by the war. Up until now, though, I'd always believed that their meeting was on their way to demob after the war; but this photograph is dated 1943: before Market Garden and well before Ar...

An emerging Horse Chestnut: a sure herald of autumn, and yet today has been unseasonably warm. Our grass is still growing like crazy and looks like it will need cutting for some time to come. We're already plotting Christmas Day, for God's sake; but have decided to ring the changes this year by having a Greek one, or at least our closest approximation of one. The menu is already being planned, but the trial cooking remains to be done: advance rehearsal will at least give us some confidence that we can pull off something we've not tried before, and go to the pub beforehand!